Benjamin Briscoe

Feature Article from Hemmings Classic Car

It's been close to 120 years since a fuzzy-cheeked Detroit kid named Ben Briscoe busted the first move that would eventually make him an iconic figure in what would someday be called the American auto industry.
Briscoe got in the game of building horseless carriages so early that it's probably fair to wonder whether he envisioned what he eventually achieved. Our guess is, he almost certainly did. Success in big industry was all but part of his DNA code.
Briscoe--pictured in the passenger seat of the 1911 Brush roadster in the accompanying photo with his brother Frank, an early automotive power in his own right, behind the wheel--clearly knew, early on in the industry's history, that any happenstance expediting its evolution beyond the domain of barnyard tinkerers could put capital in a lot of pockets, including his own. Briscoe was one of the very first people to become a supplier to firms that actually built the cars. He was the first large-scale source of stamped sheetmetal, which made it possible for manufacturers to retreat from pre-industrial carriage-maker practices and race toward mass production.
His enduring contribution to the industry's growth was his foresighted ability to deliver stamped sheetmetal in copious quantities, based on manufacturer demand. But first, Briscoe needed to complete his own journey into life, not that it took very long. He was one of the pioneering Detroiters in the car business, born there in 1867. His grandfather had first settled in the wild little hamlet in 1837, and both he and Briscoe's father, Joseph, were among the most active in advancing Michigan's industrialization through railroading. Both elder Briscoes held numerous patents for technical and safety improvements to the commonly deadly railroad rolling stock.
As we've suggested, that's great lineage for an incipient car guy. At age 19, with capitalization of exactly $432, Benjamin Briscoe organized the Briscoe Manufacturing Co., focusing on the then-relatively new trade of producing consumer goods punched out of light, bendable sheetmetal: Oil cans, wash tubs, buckets, sprinkler cans and the like. Later, he branched out into manufacturing stoves and ranges for household and restaurant use--something of a revolution in those years given the "it sinks if you throw it in the river" school of stove construction that all but mandated cast iron. Briscoe's firm would eventually be purchased by the American Can Co., and by 1901, he was already looking at other venues, specifically the toddling auto industry. He made the acquaintance of David Dunbar Buick and, later, Jonathan D. Maxwell, who had been a railroad master mechanic before hooking up with the Apperson brothers of Kokomo, Indiana. Briscoe instinctively knew that punched sheetmetal, as opposed to hand-shaped and meticulously sanded wood, was perhaps less than artful as a means of crafting cars, but would nonetheless improve the economies of scale of building them profitably.
Briscoe became a leading source of shaped, stamped sheetmetal, which is pretty much common knowledge among automotive historians. Less commonly known is his contribution, in terms of working capital, to the earliest cars produced by Buick before the Scotsman's fiscal foibles imploded the company. Its later sale to the Flint Wagon Works was partially engineered by Briscoe.
It was obvious to anyone who cared to watch his moves that Briscoe was an up-and-comer. We've already noted his nodding acquaintance with Jonathan Maxwell, who had progressed from doing his John Henry thing on the routes of the high iron to progressively successful stints with Haynes-Apperson and Ransom Eli Olds. Knowing a talent when he spotted one, Briscoe agreed to bankroll Maxwell's dream of building a car named after himself, hopped a Pennsylvania Railroad luxury express train, detrained in Manhattan and presented himself at the offices of the fabled industrial financier J.P. Morgan. There Briscoe demonstrated his not-inconsiderable powers of persuasion and walked out with $150,000 worth of sureties. Thusly capitalized, Briscoe leased a factory in Tarrytown, New York, on the Hudson River just north of today's Tappan Zee Bridge, where John Brisben Walker had built the Mobile Steam Car until his efforts went kablooey in 1903. The Maxwell-Briscoe Co. was established there in 1904, and its first models boasted honeycomb radiators (again, a technological advance enabled by Briscoe's stamped-sheetmetal expertise) and shaft drive. By 1910, Maxwell trailed only Ford and Buick in terms of unit sales. That success led Morgan to finance additional Maxwell plants in New Castle, Indiana, and Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
American industry was hobbled by a fiscal panic in 1907, which was when Briscoe seized upon his idea to consolidate Ford, Buick, Oldsmobile and Maxwell-Briscoe into a single entity. He arranged the necessary financing by offering debentures--an unsecured debt obligation backed solely by the reputation of the borrower--to auto retailers, which guaranteed them more favorable inventory financing terms if they agreed to back his United States Motor Co. The whole offer was of dubious legality that would likely get him indicted today under federal racketeering laws. In any case, U.S. Motors collapsed before it was ever truly formed, Briscoe's apparent ill-timed response to William Crapo Durant's establishment of General Motors.
Following World War I, Briscoe regrouped and channeled his energies into oil refining, including backing a Montreal-based firm that later became a founding element of Texaco. At the time of his death in 1945, Briscoe was actively involved in cultivating tung trees, valued for their rich drying oil, at his plantation in Dunellon, Florida.

This article originally appeared in the September, 2005 issue of Hemmings Classic Car.